Thursday, October 24, 2013

Random Free Short Story!!

To celebrate Halloween...here's a little short thing I wrote for free.Enjoy!

There was a time when I thought I knew
what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Probably I was twelve. Young, for sure,
to believe that glittering lie. Probably equally young when my brother first
gave me a book on Greek mythology and I read the stories with fascination.
Nothing like my worn out copies of Babysitter’s Club books, the tortured souls
in the tales captured my imagination. The one about Cassandra—cursed to see the
future without anyone believing her—might have struck my childish imagination
as sad, if it didn’t seem so cool to be able to see what would happen next.

Who knew I’d wake up one morning to
discover the keyword in creative and tortured soul was tortured?

A freak accident, the newspaper called
it. One bolt of lightning, snagged by the height of a black walnut tree, filtered
through its root and zapped into my feet as I stood, head tilted up to catch
raindrops on my tongue. For a while, I guess they worried I
might die. Even with the trip through the tree, the sheer voltage that left my
body burned and my hair sizzled off should have stopped my heart and never let
it beat again.

I didn’t die. I survived the strike. I
survived the therapy—learning to use my hands again, since my brain didn’t seem
to function correctly since the zap. I never entirely got my voice back.

I did, however, gain Cassandra’s curse.
Time, slippery at best, washed back and forth through my mind like the waves on
the beach. I couldn’t always differentiate between what would be and what was.
Even when I recognized vision for future rather than current events, I
sometimes tried to change the events.

Not that it ever mattered.

Right then, I couldn’t tell if the guy
staring at me actually leaned on the light post or if he peered out of the past
or the distant future. His corduroy jacket could be hipster cool or it could be
historical commonplace…how could I tell just by looking at him? The thing about
him that really caught my attention was that he stared right at me, like he
looked at me and could actually see me. People look at other people all the
time, smiling in passing politeness or glancing over them in rushed blindness.
Very few really saw one another, not really.

But this guy, with his faded jacket and
light hair wafting in the breeze, seemed to look into me and see the bits I
couldn’t verbalize any more. If I had a voice, I might call out to
him. Say something. I’d say something clever for sure, even if the only thing
that came to mind was hey.

He straightened, moving closer, and I
glanced at my brother. Dragged out to take me to therapy, he wasn’t even paying
attention. Instead he tapped on his phone, a constant stream of words flooding
out of his lips as meaningless as the babble of strangers speeding past us on
the sidewalk. I wished my brother would look up, verify whether or not the
handsome guy actually existed in this world or if he was for another time, but without
my words I stayed powerless to actually distract him from his enchantment with
his cell phone.

“If I told you your gift could save the
world, would you keep it? Or would you give it up to gain back the life you
might have had, the one you lost when you were cursed?” The guy’s voice was as
fascinating as the rest of him—neither too gruff nor too high pitched, the
perfect guy voice.

Again, I glanced back at my brother,
cheerfully oblivious to my strange exchange and of no help whatsoever. I couldn’t
answer the guy, so I simply shrugged as best I could, knowing the gesture came
out a little crooked. Even with therapy, my body just didn’t cooperate the way
it had before the lightning changed my world.

“That’s not an answer.” The man smiled,
a feral expression more like something you’d see on a caged animal than a man. “Answer
me.”

I couldn’t answer him, not even if I'd
wanted to. My voice, uncooperative on the best of days, wasn’t my strong point
in my new life. I opened my lips and all that escaped was a sound like, “Gllarrffn.” Blinking fast, I wished I could speak.
If I could, what would my answer have been to his strange question?

Would I save the world at the expense of
my own happiness? I didn’t think so. Everyone says they’d do it, or would like
to think they were the selfless type to do what was right for the many at the
expense of their own happiness. The thing was, I’d lived for more than a year
with no voice. I’d been silenced and frustrated for so long, I didn’t know
if I could give up more if I were honestly given a choice. Not that I thought
some strange guy, anonymous to the point of being strange, could offer me such
an option in the first place, but…

“But what if I could?”

Shaking my head at him, helpless and
unable to speak, I finally closed my eyes. Behind my closed lids, images
flickered like a dream trapped in fast forward. Colors swirled and the world
tilted sickly. I swallowed hard to keep from throwing up as the sensation
made me a bit dizzy. If you could, I’d
keep my gift, I thought. Even if I
couldn’t speak and was trapped in a way that even Cassandra wouldn’t
understand.

The man laughed, a gritty sound that
stuck in my ears and I shook my head as if to shake free of the tendrils of it
lingering in my head. “Your willingness to sacrifice has been noted…and a boon
has been granted.”

“What boon?” I demanded.

The sound of my own voice, unfettered by
my uncooperative throat and tongue, shocked me so much that I clutched at my
throat. I hadn’t heard the sound of my voice since before the strike, since the hoarse and awkward thing it’d become wasn’t me, not really.

The lingering echo of his laugh echoed
around me, louder as if renewed, and I turned slowly. He’d vanished, but I
sensed he’d not gone, not really. “You gave me back my voice.”

“It’s not the gift you might think. They
still won’t listen to you, but try. The key to saving the human race is yours…use
it wisely.”

Somehow I sensed the thing, because the
creature was not a man even if he’d worn the body of one, was not of this
earth. I also sensed that though I might have been given a greater gift
than I would have dreamed to ask for, it came with a price.

“Did you say something?” My brother
finally stuffed his all important phone in his pocket and looked at me, the
problem. That’s what I’d become to them—a problem, a situation to be dealt
with. I didn't blame my family, even knowing how they saw me now. I might have felt the same way if the shoes had been on the other proverbial foot.

“Can we please stop for coffee? I’ve
wanted a caramel macchiato for such a long time.”

The look on his face would have been
comical if I didn’t fully understand how I’d shocked him. Perhaps it wasn’t the
wisest use of my newly returned voice, but it seemed a very good time for
coffee. Dark times were coming, very dark, and
in my opinion everyone should drink as much coffee as possible before the dark
times took away the liberty of such extravagances.

I didn’t tell my brother all of that. I simply followed
him as he called our parents to tell them the miracle. He did get me the
coffee. And I watched the sky.

The darkness…it was coming. Even with a
voice, I wouldn’t be able to stop it. I could, however, at least enjoy the last
days we had in relative comfort and I planned to do just that.